Tim Brinton

The former newscaster and Tory MP Tim Brinton, who has died aged 79, introduced a generation of reluctant fellow Conservative politicians into the then mysterious arts of how to handle the media. Having been elected MP for Gravesend in Kent in the Thatcher landslide of 1979, he immediately applied his professional skills to encourage his new colleagues to use newspapers and broadcasting organisations for their political benefit.

He helped establish a scheme for media training at Conservative central office and also chaired the Conservatives' backbench media committee in order to raise the party's awareness, but faced an uphill struggle, despite the new prime minister's belief in the need for voice training and the importance of personal presentation. According to his colleague Roger Gale - also a former broadcaster - most Conservative MPs were highly resistant to such ideas. "He was dealing with MPs who ran a mile from the media, who had been taught how to avoid all journalists, and the last thing they wanted to do was to have anything published by or about them - quite the reverse."

Brinton was not a career politician and was already well into middle age when elected. He had worked for the BBC as a radio announcer from 1951 until 1955 and then for Radio Hong Kong for two years before joining ITN as one of its first newsreaders. Among his claims to journalistic fame was interviewing the Shah of Iran before his downfall, appearing as the first nude reporter on television - when recording an item about Turkish baths - and having a part, appearing as himself, as a newsreader in the 1978 comedy Carry On Emmanuelle. He had become a freelance in the early 1960s but his career path was reportedly hindered by his divorce in 1964 from his first wife, Jane-Mari Coningham, whom he had married in 1954. In 1965 he married Jeanne Wedge.

He was elected to Kent county council in 1974; his wife was also a member. The following year he was selected as the candidate for Gravesend (which became Gravesham after redistribution in 1983), trading considerable public fame as one of the best-known faces on British television for the obscurity of backbench politics. He retired at the 1987 election to concentrate on his media consultancy, training business people as well as aspirant politicians.

Brinton was a popular man, exuding a benign and genial image, and his readiness to defy the Conservative government sometimes wrongly led people to believe that he was on the "wet" left of his party. In reality, although he defended the film industry strongly, on social issues he was rightwing. He believed that the government should build more prisons rather than spend money on education in prisons, joined a group within the party which wanted to limit or stop all immigration, and opposed what he termed "trendy" ideas on education.

He was on the court and council of the University of London from 1979 and was a member of the Commons education select committee from 1980 to 1983, dissenting from at least one of its reports. When Rupert Murdoch was attempting to buy Times Newspapers and was called to appear before the committee to explain his plans, particularly for the education supplements, Brinton told him: "You're not a cultural charity." "That's fair," replied Murdoch.

Brinton was the son of a neurologist and was educated at Summer Fields school, Oxford, Eton college, Geneva University and the Central School of Speech and Drama. When complimented once by a younger colleague on his speaking voice, he replied: "Give it time. Enough whisky and cigarettes and you'll get there too."

He had been suffering from dementia for five years and went missing from his home, near Folkestone, earlier this month. The episode led his daughter Sal, the prospective Liberal Democrat candidate for Watford, to call for more community care for dementia patients.

He is survived by Jeanne, a son and three daughters from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.

• Timothy Denis Brinton, newsreader and politician, born 24 December 1929; died 24 March 2009

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